“I have to go,” I say, hanging up the phone.

I lean back in my chair and stare up at the collection of four houses on the bluff over Coyote Sumac. The view of Able’s house is even better from here, and when I squint, I can just about make out a figure on the roof, staring out toward the ocean. I know instantly that it’s Able. He’s at home, standing on his roof deck and waiting for the sun to slip behind the ocean. My heart hammers with fury that he could be doing something so ordinary, something so quietly gratifying as watching the sunset on a Monday afternoon, just like the rest of us. I think of what I told Esme, and how I wish I had been lying. I wish that the bad guys were just the bad guys, that they didn’t know exactly how to claw you down with them until your own shame becomes indistinguishable from theirs. As I watch him stare out at the ocean, I understand that I can hide myself away for as long as I want, but it will still only ever be because he made me.

When Able moves inside, a simmering anger bubbles underneath my skin for the first time in a while. The sky casts a deep red light onto the white roof of his house, and the whole ugly thing glows from the inside like it’s on fire.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Everything with Able changed a couple of months before my nineteenth birthday. I had just finished shooting the last movie where I would play a child, in a World War II film set in a concentration camp, and Able was hosting a party to celebrate at his house, the peach house up on the hill. He had ignored me throughout the entire shoot, breaking the usual pattern, and I had assumed that this time my performance really wasn’t good enough, that I hadn’t lost enough weight, or that he’d made a mistake by casting me in such an intense role. Or maybe he’d found out about the drugs I was relying on more and more to get through the weeks. The project was the first time we’d worked together since I turned eighteen, and a tiny part of me wondered if he wasn’t interested in me now that I was older, but the thought came from the deepest, most unruly part of my mind, the part I had to suffocate in order to do what I had to do, and be who I had to be every single day.

I was surprised when Able excused us from the rest of the party under the guise of showing me our next script, and he led me into his office at the back of the house. Other guests smiled indulgently at us as we passed them, both of us America’s adopted sweethearts. I remember that Emilia even waved as we went, before turning back to break up another squabble between the twins.

I floated after him, so relieved that he wanted to talk to me again. A sense of calmness descended over me that made what came next even worse. In the office, Able leaned against his desk and told me that he was finally giving in to me, that he would give me what I had wanted all this time. He unzipped his jeans as he spoke, and somehow, through my fear, I found the words to say that I didn’t think it was a good idea. He told me to stop being disingenuous. That everyone knew I’d been chasing him for years. I said I needed to go to the bathroom, but he just looked at me with blank eyes as he forced me down onto the floor and put his penis in my mouth. I started to choke. Thick saliva dripped down my chin and my eyes burned with hot, shameful tears. I was staring at a photograph of Able, Emilia and the twins on the desk behind him the whole time. He didn’t even turn it around.

Afterward, I tried to justify what happened. I’d let him believe that we had a special relationship because it had benefited me too. I didn’t want to admit that I hadn’t had a choice in any of it, and even when the disgust eventually flooded every inch of my body, it was an uninvited, complicated disgust after so many years of believing that his attention meant I was special. Every time he accused me of wanting him or needing him, or making him act this way, a tiny part of me believed him. He’d always warned me that I couldn’t trust myself, and deep down I knew I never fought back as hard as I could have.

* * *

? ? ?

At some point, I started referring to what happened in Able’s office only as “the incident” in my head. I’d had to work harder to repress it than ever before, and it wasn’t just because the physical act had been so alien to me. It was what he’d said to me before it happened that really made me feel like I was drowning. In telling me he was finally giving in to me, Able had confirmed my worst, darkest suspicions—that I had some sort of power I had been unintentionally wielding over him all these years. On the rare occasions I did allow myself to think about it, usually if I hadn’t drunk enough to blunt the edges of my mind, or if I hadn’t topped up my Percocet prescription in time, I decided to believe that there had been a miscommunication at some point, like in one of those sitcoms where everyone’s wires get crossed, only instead of ending up on a fancy blind date with my ex-boyfriend, I ended up alone in Able’s office. If I thought about it only in abstract terms, without remembering the way I’d brushed my teeth until my gums bled when I got home that night or how I couldn’t look in a mirror for three days after it happened, I could tell myself that the incident wasn’t quite so bad. I flinched every time someone came near me.

My agent informed me that I had the best part of a year languishing ahead of me while Able developed his new project, the one he had been “showing” me the early draft of that night in his office. At first I was relieved that I wouldn’t have to see him, but after a couple of months, when I hadn’t heard a word from him, my disgust made way for an all-consuming terror that he no longer wanted me for the part, even though Nathan and Kit assured me that he did. I was so used to our usual pattern—Able’s focused dedication at the start of a project, the rare flattery he would display to get me to sign—that I figured I’d done something really bad for him to be ignoring me like this.

For the first time in my life I was filled with both an expanse of free time and an acute, overwhelming awareness of how much trust we put in the hands of other people every single day of our lives. It was a crippling combination. There was no guarantee that the car coming toward me at a crossing was actually going to stop at the red light, yet I was still expected to step right out, and nobody could promise me that one of the many strange, older men waiting outside my hotel with a camera wouldn’t just cross that line one night and force his way into my room. It all seemed so fragile to me, the trust we put in others without thinking about it, and once I realized it, the loneliness hit me like nothing I’d felt before.

When I woke up on my nineteenth birthday with my cheek stuck to the dirty floor of a strip club on the wrong end of Sunset Boulevard, watching underneath the toilet cubicle door as the girls adjusted their wigs and stiletto fastenings, I couldn’t even lie to myself that I was okay anymore. Something was broken in my brain, and the more I tried to block it out, the worse it was getting.

I texted Nathan to tell him I wouldn’t be doing the movie, and that I was done with it all, and I asked him to pass the news on to the rest of my team. Then I turned up at my parents’ house in Anaheim much like I have every other time before and since, with my tail between my legs and a duffel bag filled with designer clothes, only this time I sank to my knees the moment my dad answered the door.

For a couple of weeks everything seemed like it was getting better. I told my parents I was recovering from a bad flu and stayed in bed, watching old sitcom reruns on the TV in my room. My dad brought my meals to my bedroom door, and even my mom, whom I’d barely had one civil conversation with since I left home, seemed to enter into an unspoken peace treaty with me. One night, she even ran me a bath filled with bubbles that smelled like rose petals, and in return I listened to her stories about Esme with a fixed smile on my face. I knew it was a fragile peace, effective only until I informed them of my decision to leave behind everything they had sacrificed for me to have, but it still felt better than anything else I could be doing.